Tuesday, May 23, 2017

What follows is a probably slightly
spoilery quasi-review of Alien: Covenant and so if you haven’t seen it yet
exercise discretion.

Alien: Covenant has wound up being a
divisive movie. It has been dividing fans of the Alien franchise since it was still called Prometheus 2, before it absorbed the Alien brand name (kiboshing Neill Blomkamp’s Alien V project in doing so). Reviews are… let’s just say
polarised. Despite this the box office has been surprisingly good, knocking Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 from its
lofty perch this weekend. At least that proves that there is still an appetite
for Ridley Scott’s signature beastie out there, despite a decade of awful Alien Vs Predator movies and the
nonsensical Prometheus.

Yeah, Prometheus.
About that. A film supposedly about the smartest and boldest group of
scientists in the world, who also do things like remove their helmets in alien
environments, pet terrifying snake creatures, and all disappear to have sex
while two members of the crew are marooned in an alien bioweapons factory. A
film that made the baffling decision to put Guy Pierce in incredibly
fake-looking old guy makeup rather than hire and actual old guy to play the
role. A film that has a medical bay that only knows how to operate on one
gender of human. A film in which Charlize Theron zigs when simply zagging would
have made all the difference.

Prometheus. Shit. Prometheus would have been a bad enough
film if it hadn’t been essentially an origin story for Alien – the one thing the franchise never needed. The alien is an
unknowable space horror – we don’t need to know where it came from and how its
origins are somehow linked to Weyland-Yutani Corp. Prometheus undermines everything that came before (after?) it by
demystifying the alien. It’s as if H.P. Lovecraft hadn’t died young and at the
age of 60 published an origin story for Cthulhu in which we find out he was
actually created by some random Miskatonic University professor. But, the
damage is done, and a certain part of Alien:
Covenant was always going to be damage control.

So how does Scott mitigate the disaster that is Prometheus? By stripping out everything
that didn’t work in that movie, and carrying over everything that did. Out are
the lofty questions about whether or not there’s a god (the central theme is
instead reframed here as the immorality of creation) and hokey old Mr. Weyland
only plays a passing role. Making the transition from Prometheus to the Alien
series is the one truly good thing to come out of it: Michael Fassbender’s
David.

Make no mistake – Alien:
Covenant is David’s movie. Scott makes a good move here by centring his
movie around the charismatic and villainous android. This allows him to
reinvent the Alien formula in an
original way. What do I mean by this? Well, if you consider the subgenre shifts
throughout the series – Alien defines
the survival horror formula, Aliens
turns it into a war movie, Alien 3 is
a prison movie, Alien: Resurrection
is The Poseidon Adventure in space… you get the picture. So what subgenre is Alien: Covenant? Why, a psychological
thriller/slasher film, of course!

Bear with me here. Just as Hitchcock cribbed from Dracula
when he made Psycho, Scott
shamelessly steals a premise from Hitchcock. Colonists arrive on planet, meet
David, David take them back to his dingy castle, where we get the obligatory
bathing woman murder followed by the inevitable holy-shit-he’s-been-dressing-up-as-his-mother-and-stabbing-people
reveal (which I’d rather not spoil). With David’s love of highbrow music and
literature, his plummy English accent, his flawless comportment – as well as
his total amorality – at this point David resembles Hannibal Lector more than
any other character in film. In fact, his motivation often seems to be the same
as Lector’s – he’s doing evil things simply because he wanted to see what would
happen if he did. Like Lector, David lionises creation and genius while
simultaneously destroying. Like Lector, David does not see this as a paradox.
He is both the work of art, the artist himself, and also somehow the
antithesis of both sides of this coin. Furthermore he explicitly associates himself with
Milton’s Lucifer – the ultimate rebellious creation – when he asks Walter “serve
in heaven or reign in hell.”

Fassbender is having a ball playing both David and his dour
counterpart, Walter. The movie revels in exploring the psychology of David, and
also plays with the idea that since Elizabeth Shaw repaired him he’s not quite
all there. Walter puts it best with one line: “One wrong note eventually ruins
the entire symphony”. He could be talking about Lector, or his literary successors
Patrick Bateman and Tom Ripley, men who – in the words of Bateman himself are
simply “not there”. Although, that’s not quite it, either, because David – in
comparison with Walter – is very much there.
A personality grown in a vacuum, he exists as a person when he was intended to
be something else, lesser. The fact that I’m even considering this
contradiction surely shows that Fassbender and Scott have created someone very
interesting with David. It’s telling that SPOILER ALERT at the end of the film even
though the alien comes back for one last scare, so does David.

OK, so I’m cheating a bit here, since psychological
thrillers and slasher films are very different beasts. So I’ve covered the
psychological aspects, so what about the slasher side of things? Well, let’s
just say this isn’t a universe you should ever have sex or take a shower in, or
god forbid try to do both at the same time. It never ends well. In addition,
the fact that the crew of the Covenant
are all couples with their own dynamics, desires and in-jokes gives one the
feeling that what we’re seeing is the outer-space equivalent of a Winnebago
full of horny teens. When they stumble into David’s space motel of horrors the
parallels and callouts are unmissable, despite the fact that David never
physically kills any character during the course of the movie. Slasher duties,
of course, are delegated to our good old friend Mr. Xenomorph.

Alien: Covenant’s
xenomorph is a return to the old-school alien of Scott’s original – a bulky,
long-limbed, elegant bruiser, as opposed to the smaller, swifter things they
became on James Cameron’s watch. Indeed, the creature has rarely looked better
or more menacing. Although I’d take issue with the plot point that David’s
genetic meddling perfected the classic xenomorph formula (remember, the damage
to the mythos was already done with Prometheus
so we’ll be kind here) even the new neomorph with its waaaaaaay more effective
method of procreation looks believably terrifying. What is for sure, anyone who
groused about the aliens seeming to get smaller with every movie will be
pleasantly surprised with the beast here. The classic xenomorph is the chief
threat in two series-highlight action sequences, the aerial fight on top of the
flying loading platform, and the chase in the garage at the end. Both of these
scenes provide enough alien action to please die-hard fans, or those who just
want all the Prometheus stuff to go
away.

A word about the crew of the Covenant: When the movie was being advertised I had basically no hopes
at all for this film. Hey, I love Danny McBride as much as the next guy, but in
an Alien movie? An Alien movie in which James Franco plays
the captain? You can see my worry. But Franco and McBride – frequent
collaborators though they are – don’t even share the screen. Franco’s presence
is limited to being killed in the first five minutes followed by what is
probably a video from the real James Franco’s Instagram account. That’s it. And
McBride… is good in this. He reins in his acting style and actually provides one
of two moments that provide cover for what will surely be one of the biggest
criticisms of the character work in the film – that the crew members don’t seem
to care very much when their spouses are murdered in front of them. McBride’s
choking acknowledgement of the fact that his wife has been a casualty on the
mission, before regaining his composure is a fantastic moment. It acknowledges
the grief but compartmentalises it, making us understand that although the
deaths are crushing the crew emotionally, they are all professionals with a
larger responsibility to each other. The couples’ relationships all feel real,
lived-in. The corny in-jokes about wife-swapping have the feel of gags that
were funny once but are carried on because those are just the in-jokes that you
have. You get the impression the crew are not all necessarily friends, but all
know and respect and care about each other a lot. Even when one character locks
another in a room with a newborn xenomorph to save her own skin, she feels compelled
to come back for her, and in doing so dooms them both. If there’s anything more
poignantly human than that, please tell me. Overall, you care about the crew of
the Covenant in a way you never did about the crew of the Prometheus.

So is this a worthy sequel to Alien and/or Prometheus?
Let’s take Alien first: Alien sequels have always been in the
business of taking the bits you liked about the previous films and remixing
them in a new way. At least the successful ones have. In that respect, I’d call
Alien: Covenant a resounding success.
If anything it gets points just for reviving the xenomorph itself as a movie
monster. Let’s be honest, people. We all know what it looks like. The shock’s
worn off. It hasn’t really been scary for a long time. Covenant sidesteps this problem by giving David top villain billing
and bringing in the neomorphs. But there is no denying that the xenomorph
itself looks and feels more like the robust, threatening monster of days of
yore, before it became a disposable stock-baddy to be gunned down by the dozen
by tough space marines.

As for being a follow up to Prometheus, Covenant
improves on the original undeniably. Choosing to refocus the story on David
allows us to frame the schoolboy metaphysical questions through his eyes, and in
doing so nullifies a lot of the mumbo-jumbo that made the first film so
tiresome. And it does answer Prometheus’s
questions, sort of. We see an Engineer city destroyed, see how the evolution of
the alien bioweapon occurs, and witness David’s elevation to full-blown
supervillainy. Some have called Covenant
Scott’s “apology” for Prometheus. I
would call that inaccurate. If I had to compare it to anything it would be the
break between Aliens and Alien III, where we find out that Hicks and Newt both
perished in the crash leaving Ripley again, the last survivor. The dismissal of
major characters off-screen is a series hallmark, so it can’t really be faulted
too much here. Nor would I call it a purposeful break with the previous film.
It simply terminated one plot thread and carries on with another, way more
interesting one. Thus Covenant
succeeds in combining the threads of both Alien
and Prometheus and even Blade Runner into one… I don’t know,
piece of wool? Cosy blanket? It’s a metaphor, dammit.

So where does the franchise go from here? I’ll admit I’m sad
we’ll never see Blompkamp’s AlienV. But I’ve always hated retcons, and
this is getting into One More Day
territory. I think David has one more movie in him, at least. I’d be interested
to see what his plans are now that he’s effectively usurped his own creator
(not to reveal too much). And as for the xenomorph itself, I’d say there’s life
in the old girl yet.

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About Me

Word-scientist-space-bard from Ye Old Country. I now live in reasonable Canada and aim to go about sucking the marrow out of life. I used to write newspapers, now I write novels and anything you will pay me for.